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For lovers of books and gadgets. Est. 1995.Fri, 15 Jul 2016 13:20:09 +0000enhourly198011808Amazon sues sellers who posted fake reviewshttp://teleread.com/amazon-sues-sellers-who-posted-fake-reviews/
http://teleread.com/amazon-sues-sellers-who-posted-fake-reviews/#commentsThu, 02 Jun 2016 18:51:26 +0000http://teleread.com/?p=163250Amazon’s serious about eliminating fake reviews from its site, and the latest move in its take-no-prisoners approach is to sue three of its marketplace sellers who have used sock puppet accounts to leave positive reviews for their own products. Amazon is asking that the sellers be barred from any sales on or use of Amazon’s services, and that they have to give up any profits they made on Amazon, attorneys’ fees, and over $25,000 in damages. “Our goal is to eliminate the incentives for sellers to engage in review abuse and shut down this ecosystem around fraudulent reviews in exchange for compensation,” an Amazon spokesperson said. It’s certainly understandable Amazon

]]>Amazon’s serious about eliminating fake reviews from its site, and the latest move in its take-no-prisoners approach is to sue three of its marketplace sellers who have used sock puppet accounts to leave positive reviews for their own products. Amazon is asking that the sellers be barred from any sales on or use of Amazon’s services, and that they have to give up any profits they made on Amazon, attorneys’ fees, and over $25,000 in damages.

“Our goal is to eliminate the incentives for sellers to engage in review abuse and shut down this ecosystem around fraudulent reviews in exchange for compensation,” an Amazon spokesperson said.

]]>http://teleread.com/amazon-sues-sellers-who-posted-fake-reviews/feed/1163250Fanfic peril recedes as J.J. Abrams announces Paramount will drop ‘Axanar’ lawsuithttp://teleread.com/fanfic-peril-recedes-as-j-j-abrams-announces-paramount-will-drop-axanar-lawsuit/
http://teleread.com/fanfic-peril-recedes-as-j-j-abrams-announces-paramount-will-drop-axanar-lawsuit/#commentsSun, 22 May 2016 16:30:29 +0000http://www.teleread.com/?p=162488Remember that Star Trek: Axanar lawsuit we mentioned a while back? The one that could potentially have had a chilling effect on fanfic, not to mention other fan films and creative efforts? Well, good news: thanks to the efforts of past Trek film director J.J. Abrams, and upcoming Trek film director Justin Lin, Paramount says it’s going to drop the lawsuit. Abrams and Lin feel that fans should be celebrating Star Trek, not at odds with the studio who owns it. And, speaking more cynically, they probably also recognized that it wouldn’t be a good thing for the future of the franchise to get fans angry enough that they boycott

Abrams and Lin feel that fans should be celebrating Star Trek, not at odds with the studio who owns it. And, speaking more cynically, they probably also recognized that it wouldn’t be a good thing for the future of the franchise to get fans angry enough that they boycott the upcoming Trek film, Star Trek Beyond—especially after the last Trek film, Into Darkness, annoyed a number of fans already with its treatment of long-time villain Khan Noonian Singh.

Meanwhile, the studio behind Axanar released a statement saying they’re grateful for Abrams’s and Lin’s support, but the suit hasn’t been dropped yet and they want to work with CBS and Paramount to make sure “all matters are settled.” Whether that means they might make changes to the forthcoming film to make it less overtly “Trekky” is unclear.

It’s also unclear whether Paramount will simply wait a few months until Beyond is out of theaters and Axanar is released and refile the suit then. Let’s not forget that Axanar is seen by some as a violation of the unwritten contract between fan film producers and Paramount that Paramount won’t get on their case if they don’t profiteer on their work. Raising over a million dollars on a Kickstarter campaign and using that money to pay salaries and fund a professional film studio that will make other works after Axanar seems more than a little iffy from a “no-profiteering” proposition.

But at this point, the Axanar lawsuit was something on the order of a Kobayashi Maru for Paramount—a classic no-win scenario. If they let it pass, they risked setting a precedent that would let others fund their own quasi-professional “fan films” that could endanger their Star Trek intellectual property ownership. If they carried on with the lawsuit, they would anger fans and risk diminishing the value of the latest installment of that intellectual property. It was simply a question of choosing the least bad outcome—and at this point, with a new multi-million-dollar Trek movie in the offing, it’s clear which value is worth more to them to protect right now.

]]>http://teleread.com/fanfic-peril-recedes-as-j-j-abrams-announces-paramount-will-drop-axanar-lawsuit/feed/3162488Author sues Simon & Schuster over ‘sale’ vs. ‘license’ royalty rates for e-bookshttp://teleread.com/author-sues-simon-schuster-over-sale-vs-license-royalty-rates-for-e-books/
http://teleread.com/author-sues-simon-schuster-over-sale-vs-license-royalty-rates-for-e-books/#commentsSun, 22 May 2016 15:00:40 +0000http://www.teleread.com/?p=162483The split-personality issue of digital content “sales” rears its ugly head again, as author Dr. Sheldon Blau files a class action suit against Simon & Schuster on behalf of all S&S authors with e-book editions. The crux of the matter has to do with the e-book royalty rate. Publishers pay authors a 25% royalty rate on e-books—the rate used for “sales.” However, in actual fact e-books simply aren’t sold—read the terms of use for any e-book store and you’ll see that they’re actually licensed. This is important because licenses are supposed to pay out a royalty rate of 50%. This follows on the heels of a 2007 lawsuit by Eminem’s

It took a few years, but it seems that chicken is finally starting to come home to roost. Dr. Blau’s lawsuit holds that e-books are licenses, not sales, and royalties should be paid out at the license rate—double the current sale rate. If this goes through, it has the potential to do some serious financial damage to publishers everywhere. If Dr. Blau loses on appeal, it has a strong potential to go to the Supreme Court the way the Eminem suit didn’t—a loss could set up a circuit split between New York’s 2nd Circuit and the 9th Circuit in which Eminem had his win, meaning SCOTUS would have to step in to break the tie.

This has been a known issue to e-book users for quite some time. For all that e-book stores feature a “Buy” button, not a “License” button, you don’t actually get the legal right to treat an e-book the way you would a print book—reselling it, or lending it to friends. That’s prohibited in the license, and enforced by restrictive DRM. This all came up in the House hearings on the First Sale Doctrine in 2014. John Villasenor thought that e-book sellers should just inform customers more clearly that they’re only licensing the e-book, not “buying” it, and that would make everything better by incentivizing “content providers to offer licenses that are more flexible”. I still think that outlook is far too optimistic.

In any event, it’s not clear yet whether the fallout from this case will have any effect on consumers’ purchases of e-books. If royalty rates have to go up, it’s possible publishers could try to raise their e-book prices even further to cover those outlays. But it’s still too soon to know. It’s entirely possible that the lawsuit will fizzle, given that Dr. Blau did sign a contract, which he needn’t have done if he found the terms objectionable. I’ll definitely be keeping a close eye on the progress of this lawsuit.

]]>http://teleread.com/author-sues-simon-schuster-over-sale-vs-license-royalty-rates-for-e-books/feed/1162483Used e-book sales ahead if this case applies? ReDigi settles damages, prepares to appeal Capital used digital music verdicthttp://teleread.com/redigi-settles-damages-prepares-to-appeal-capital-used-digital-media-lawsuit/
http://teleread.com/redigi-settles-damages-prepares-to-appeal-capital-used-digital-media-lawsuit/#respondMon, 11 Apr 2016 06:28:46 +0000http://www.teleread.com/?p=158404The dream of reselling used e-books may not be dead just yet. Digital media resale startup ReDigi has reached a settlement in its four-year-old legal battle with Capital Records that will let it move forward with its appeal. Although the case currently centers on digital music, any precedent it sets will apply equally to any digital media—music, movies, video games, or e-books. It’s been a while since we last heard from ReDigi. The last time the company was in the news was when it took part in the House of Representatives First Sale Doctrine hearing in 2014. Since then, it’s been plugging away at its legal battle. ReDigi started out

ReDigi started out by setting up to permit resale of iTunes music, and was then sued by EMI, parent company of Capital Records. The circuit court ruled against ReDigi—not a great surprise, given that circuit courts tend to be reluctant to reverse existing law—but it’s taken a while to iron out damages, and the court wouldn’t let ReDigi appeal until the damages question was settled.

ReDigi has now settled the damages question with Capital, though the details aren’t yet public. The important thing about the settlement is not so much that ReDigi has agreed to pay Capital damages, but that now that the matter is settled, ReDigi can proceed to appeal the case in a higher court.

This puts me in mind of the way Apple settled damages in the agency pricing lawsuit by agreeing to pay out a certain amount if it lost, and a different amount if the case was remanded to a lower court for further consideration. We don’t know exactly what ReDigi and Capital agreed, but now that they have, the case can move forward.

I remain skeptical that digital resale will ever go anywhere. As I’ve noted before, it’s still quite possible to crack digital media DRM and make DRM-free backup copies. Since reselling digital media relies on that DRM to manage the sale, this means it will be possible for people to “resell” their digital media while still holding onto it. It’s already possible to do exactly the same thing for Overdrive library e-books, but at least no money’s changing hands for those.

Now that the circuit court phase is out of the way, I’m looking forward to seeing how the appeal goes. You never know—it’s not impossible that in a few years, we might be able to resell digital content just as easily as we can resell print content. But I’m not going to hold my breath.

]]>http://teleread.com/redigi-settles-damages-prepares-to-appeal-capital-used-digital-media-lawsuit/feed/0158404Ellora’s Cave author Ann Jacobs files request to intervene in Dear Author lawsuithttp://teleread.com/elloras-cave-author-ann-jacobs-files-suit-to-intervene-in-dear-author-lawsuit/
http://teleread.com/elloras-cave-author-ann-jacobs-files-suit-to-intervene-in-dear-author-lawsuit/#respondFri, 21 Aug 2015 19:30:00 +0000http://www.teleread.com/?p=134281When I last mentioned erotica e-book publisher Ellora’s Cave, in the context of discussing a Guardian story about the popularity of erotica e-books, some commenters remarked on the lack of mention of the ongoing lawsuit between Ellora’s Cave and romance blog Dear Author. I hadn’t brought it up because I hadn’t been aware of any new developments in the 11-month-old suit, and it didn’t seem germane to the general topic of the popularity of e-rotica in general. However, Courtney Milan has just blogged about some new developments, so it seems like a good time to take another look at said case. We posted an overview in September, 2014 when the

According to Milan, the case is undergoing discovery—the phase when lawyers for each side get to subpoena evidence from the other. Ellora’s Cave has completed its half, and according to the schedule, Dear Author should be filing a summary judgment motion sometime soon.

What’s the new development? One of Ellora’s Cave’s authors, Ann Jacobs, has filed a motion seeking to intervene. (Courtney Milan links to PDFs of both the motion and a counterclaim.) Essentially, Jacobs says that Ellora’s Cave hasn’t been paying her proper royalties, and since the whole fight with Dear Author is over claims that Ellora’s Cave hasn’t been paying proper royalties, she wants her case to be considered in conjunction with the Dear Author one.

At issue is whether Jacobs’s royalties were supposed to be based on the cover price or on the sale price if the books were marked down. Jacobs insists that her contract required they be based on cover price. She states that when she brought this up, Ellora’s Cave attempted to change the contract unilaterally to base royalties on sale price. According to Jacobs’s claim, that kind of change is not permitted under the contract without a signed agreement between Ellora’s Cave and Jacobs herself.

Milan notes that she is not an expert in this particular field of law, so she could be mistaken, but she deems it unlikely the judge will permit the intervention. The appropriate time to have filed it would have been right after the case was filed, not 11 months later as discovery is wrapping up. She writes:

Filing this claim as a motion to intervene was probably not the way to maximize the chances of success. If I had to guess, and this is purely a guess, I would say that this is an exercise in saber rattling. This is the saber I hear being rattled: Revert my titles, now, or you’ll spend well into the six figure mark defending your existence.

There are hints in the filing that Jacobs could be aiming for a class-action suit on behalf of all the authors Ellora’s Cave has allegedly underpaid, which could end up being a big headache for the publisher if it should come to pass.

So, that seems to be the current state of things in the Ellora’s Cave litigation. It should be interesting to see if anything more comes of this.

]]>http://teleread.com/elloras-cave-author-ann-jacobs-files-suit-to-intervene-in-dear-author-lawsuit/feed/0134281Connor Cochran rebuts Internet troll’s allegations over Conlan Press product delayshttp://teleread.com/connor-cochran-rebuts-ex-employees-allegations-over-conlan-press-product-delays/
http://teleread.com/connor-cochran-rebuts-ex-employees-allegations-over-conlan-press-product-delays/#commentsTue, 09 Dec 2014 03:13:37 +0000http://www.teleread.com/?p=122395Update (9/30/2015): I have been contacted by Patrick Lake’s lawyers, who asked for a revision to the story to make it more clear that these are Cochran’s allegations, which Lake vigorously disputes. Lake has filed a counter-claim. I have made the requested revisions. Update (9/1/2015): The below story is a little out-of-date at this point, but not quite enough has come to light for a whole new post on the matter, so I’m updating this story for the sake of anyone who stumbles across it in Google. In the months that followed the publication of the original story, Cochran has come to believe that the identity of the Internet troll

Update (9/30/2015): I have been contacted by Patrick Lake’s lawyers, who asked for a revision to the story to make it more clear that these are Cochran’s allegations, which Lake vigorously disputes. Lake has filed a counter-claim. I have made the requested revisions.

Update (9/1/2015): The below story is a little out-of-date at this point, but not quite enough has come to light for a whole new post on the matter, so I’m updating this story for the sake of anyone who stumbles across it in Google.

In the months that followed the publication of the original story, Cochran has come to believe that the identity of the Internet troll running the defamatory web site has become revealed as a man named Patrick Lake. Cochran states that it took six months of trying to serve him with legal papers, as he was very canny about dodging them, but they finally got him—and then, Cochran says, he was arrested for attacking and injuring the housemate who cooperated in serving him the papers. (Lake claims the fight was reciprocal and is disputing the criminal complaint.) Cochran claims that the evidence against him was so strong that Lake did not even attempt to defend himself, and Cochran has filed for a default judgment and damages. He says that he expects to have a court order to shut the attack site down within a few days.

Cochran has posted his side of the dispute to his Facebook here, here, and here, and in comments below.

In the letter I received, Lake’s attorney states that Lake actually did respond to Cochran in court in May, demonstrating that he wasn’t properly served at his former employer’s office. (The dates of the court documents show that it did take four more months after that for Lake to be successfully served, even after Lake was sufficiently aware that Cochran was trying to serve him to respond in court.) Lake’s attorneys unsuccessfully attempted to explain to Cochran’s attorneys that Cochran’s allegations were misplaced. Subsequently, Lake has filed a cross-claim against Cochran for defamation, stating that he has nothing to do with Fans Against Fraud and Cochran has been spreading defamatory rumors about him. He also states Lake did not forge Cochran’s signature on the contract, and states that Cochran reached it, and chose to settle when Lake threatened to sue him over it.

Update: Cochran has determined the responsible party is not his former employee after all; said employee has contacted Cochran in such a way as to convince Cochran it wasn’t him, and apologized for his prior behavior. Cochran reports that more evidence has emerged about who the responsible party actually is, and he has provided that information to his lawyers and instructed them to “go after him to the fullest extent of the law.

It’s never easy to have to deal with trolls, and Connor Cochran, publisher of Conlan Press, best known for publishing works of Peter S. Beagle including The Last Unicorn, might have it worse than most. Over the last few weeks, an ex-Conlan Press employee Internet troll has begun spouting allegations against the publisher relating to delays on filling a small number of orders for a customized product, and over the weekend he managed to find some press coverage via pop culture blog Bleeding Cool. Cochran has responded with his side of the story [update: the post has since been removed], (also covered by Bleeding Cool) and plans to file suit for defamation.

I’ve been acquainted with Connor Cochran and Peter S. Beagle for quite some time, ever since I interviewed them on my “Biblio File” podcast for several hours way back in 2007. Cochran essentially formed his publishing business for the purpose of helping Beagle out of the bad financial situation he’d gotten into after a number of publishers had failed to pay Beagle what he was owed. He’s a great guy, and I know he has worked tirelessly on helping Beagle, and a number of other authors as well.

And he’s met with a good deal of success. In 2011, Cochran and Beagle came to an agreement with Granada Media to make good the years of royalties Beagle was owed on the movie adaptation of The Last Unicorn, and cooperate going forward. That led directly to the Last Unicorn screening tour, in which Beagle and Cochran are traveling from city to city with a newly-restored print of the movie. (I am looking forward to 2016, when it should finally hit Indiana.)

All the same, Cochran is very busy, and Conlan Press is a very small operation that takes up almost all his time (especially considering that he and Peter are spending so much time on the road with the movie tour). This means he has less of it to devote to projects such as doing personal sketches in the current “Extra Deluxe Edition” of The Last Unicorn books. As a result, they’ve been coming out very slowly over the last few years.

In the last month, an Internet troll has taken to posting defamatory statements about Cochran on a web site, Fans Against Fraud. Cochran formerly thought the troll was an ex-employee, but it turns out to have been someone else. The individual claims and responses aren’t really all that interesting. It’s effectively a troll posting flamebait on the Internet, no more and no less. If it weren’t that he was using assets Cochran claims he obtained illicitly from Conlan Press and potentially seriously harming Cochran’s business (and his customers’ privacy) Cochran would probably be better off leaving it be. Certainly the lawsuit is going to draw more attention to Fans Against Fraud’s claims. But Cochran has solid responses to those claims, and feels he will be vindicated in court.

Besides, the troll’s claims aren’t even anything new. Works being delayed, sometimes for years, was happening well before the troll was even hired. I placed an order for a set of Last Unicorn audiobook MP3 CDs on April 15, 2005 and it still hasn’t shipped yet. But that’s not due to any sort of malfeasance on Cochran’s part, other than perhaps being a bit more ambitious in some of his projects than was truly wise for a one-person business. Given the number of Kickstarter projects that have failed to deliver over the last few years, he’s hardly alone in that. But unlike those Kickstarters, Cochran is offering full refunds to anyone and everyone who wants them. He provides email addresses and phone numbers in his post for those who wish to get in touch with him..

As I was writing this story, I spoke to Cochran via one of those phone numbers, and he explained that the last holdup before shipping the MP3 CDs is some illustrations commissioned for an accompanying book from renowned fantasy artist John Howe. The commissions had been delayed due to Howe’s work as a conceptual design artist for the Hobbit trilogy for the last several years. Now that the trilogy is finished, Cochran anticipates getting the art in very soon, and if not, he might go ahead and finalize the project without it. I opted to go ahead and wait for it. After all, it’s been 9 1/2 years; what’s a few more months?

It’s a pity that this sort of thing should happen right when Cochran and Beagle are finally seeing some well-deserved success after all their hard work. That might very well be why the troll is speaking up now. Hopefully Cochran can find the time and resources to ship out all those back-orders soon—and I’m really looking forward to seeing them in my hometown in 2016.

Update: The person behind fansagainstfraud.com claims not to be that ex-employee after all. In a post on his Facebook page, Cochran is dubious, but looks forward to getting the matter cleared up one way or another in court.

]]>http://teleread.com/connor-cochran-rebuts-ex-employees-allegations-over-conlan-press-product-delays/feed/8122395Ellora’s Cave sues Dear Author over ‘defamatory’ blog posthttp://teleread.com/elloras-cave-sues-dear-author-over-defamatory-blog-post/
http://teleread.com/elloras-cave-sues-dear-author-over-defamatory-blog-post/#commentsSat, 27 Sep 2014 01:59:29 +0000http://www.teleread.com/?p=118895Well, that was unexpected. The saga of Ellora’s Cave has been chronicled over the last few months, and especially over the last few weeks, on various e-book blogs I read. For example, from The Passive Voice: Ellora’s Cave The mysterious case of the missing royalty checks from Ellora’s Cave More Ellora’s Cave troubles… Cat Grant Gives Away Her Unreverted Ellora’s Cave Titles And those are just from the last week or so. Authors have complained about royalty checks not arriving, and the publisher refusing to revert the rights to their titles, and so on. And Jane Litte at the Dear Author blog wrote a post called “The Curious Case of

And those are just from the last week or so. Authors have complained about royalty checks not arriving, and the publisher refusing to revert the rights to their titles, and so on. And Jane Litte at the Dear Author blog wrote a post called “The Curious Case of Ellora’s Cave” discussing the matter.

But as it turns out, the publisher of Ellora’s Cave found Litte’s post to be a bridge too far, and has filed suit against her for defamation. She claims that none of the things Litte said in her article—authors not being paid, Ellora’s Cave liquidating assets, and so on—are true, and wants Dear Author to have to take down the postings, be prohibited from writing anything else about Ellora’s Cave, reveal the identity of commenters to her articles (which could include some anonymous EC authors or staff), and pay $25,000 plus punitive damages.

Litte has been fairly positive about the affair on her Twitter account, writing, “Dear @ellorascave I welcome your suit and look forward to inspecting all of your books. Truth is a defense in defamation cases.” She feels she can prove everything she wrote, and is looking for an Ohio lawyer specializing in defamation to defend the suit. (Seems clear she hasn’t found one yet; I suspect the first thing such a lawyer would have told her would be not to make any further statements about the case on social media.)

At The Digital Reader, Nate suggests that this could be a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) lawsuit. which could get it dismissed (and Ellora’s Cave in trouble?) if it happens to be the case. That remains to be seen.

But whether it’s true or not, this will absolutely serve to draw all the more attention to the troubles Ellora’s Cave may or may not be having, as outlets that hadn’t had much interest in covering the proceedings before (such as this one!) are suddenly moved to report on the lawsuit to all their readers. Hello, Streisand Effect, so nice to see you again…

And then there’s the question of whether Ellora’s Cave actually did open itself to discovery—which is to say, Jane Litte’s lawyers being allowed to look through its books to ascertain whether or not what she said was true. I know that in theory this is supposed to happen when a lawsuit is filed, but so much that’s true in theory turns out not to hold water in the real world, so I’m not holding my breath until more facts come out.

]]>http://teleread.com/elloras-cave-sues-dear-author-over-defamatory-blog-post/feed/1118895Robinson-Patman, Amazon, the publishers, and the ABA: Where’s the lawsuit? (Updated)http://teleread.com/robinsono-patman-amazon-the-publishers-and-the-aba-wheres-the-lawsuit/
http://teleread.com/robinsono-patman-amazon-the-publishers-and-the-aba-wheres-the-lawsuit/#commentsTue, 03 Jun 2014 19:16:11 +0000http://www.teleread.com/?p=114026Two different op-eds have popped up on CNN and Al Jazeera suggesting that Amazon, big bully that it is in the Hachette negotiation, needs to be taken down a peg under the Robinson-Patman Act. (If you didn’t hear a raspy voice say “I’m Patman” when I mentioned the name of that law, I’m pretty sure you did just now.) Robinson-Patman is an anti-predatory-pricing regulation that’s on the books dating back to the ‘30s, intended to prevent businesses from charging different prices in different towns to undercut local competition, or from using their size to bully suppliers into giving them better deals than they give smaller companies. Sound familiar? The editorialists

]]>Two different op-eds have popped up on CNN and Al Jazeera suggesting that Amazon, big bully that it is in the Hachette negotiation, needs to be taken down a peg under the Robinson-Patman Act. (If you didn’t hear a raspy voice say “I’m Patman” when I mentioned the name of that law, I’m pretty sure you did just now.)

Robinson-Patman is an anti-predatory-pricing regulation that’s on the books dating back to the ‘30s, intended to prevent businesses from charging different prices in different towns to undercut local competition, or from using their size to bully suppliers into giving them better deals than they give smaller companies. Sound familiar? The editorialists (whose views, it should be noted, do not represent CNN or Al Jazeera) seem to think so.

Writer Onnesha Roychoudhuri writes in Al Jazeera:

The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice used to measure competition in diversity of retailers as well as low prices. The Robinson-Patman Act — on the books since the 1930s — made it illegal for a company to charge different prices in different towns in order to undersell local stores. With good reason: It’s a strategy that breeds monopolies, allowing a big company to come in, eliminate competitors by underselling them and then charge whatever it wants to a newly captive consumer audience. While the Robinson-Patman Act still exists, as evidenced by the metastasizing of Wal-Mart stores over the years, the FTC and DOJ don’t enforce it. “They’ve almost completely backed away,” former FTC lawyer John Kirkwood told me, pointing out that courts now view such cases as anti-consumer. In other words, opinion has shifted to a near fundamentalist faith in the idea that low prices are all that matter.

Lina Khan, policy analyst at the New America Foundation, adds in the CNN piece:

"If the government still enforced Robinson-Patman, it would go a fair way towards limiting the power of Amazon," said Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, which represents independent bookstores. He would know: In the 1990s, ABA brought numerous cases against both publishers and chain stores for violating Robinson-Patman.

Not a lawyer or anything, but there are a couple of problems I see here.

First of all, economy of scale is a defense to Robinson-Patman Act charges. Volume discounts are explicitly declared all right. The FTC’s Q&A page on the Act puts it thus:

Q: I operate two stores that sell compact discs. My business is being ruined by giant discount chains that sell their products for less than my wholesale cost. What can I do?

A: Discount chains may be able to buy compact discs at a lower wholesale price because it costs the manufacturer less, on a per-unit basis, to deal with large-volume customers. If so, the manufacturer may have a "cost justification" defense to the differential pricing and the policy would not violate the Robinson-Patman Act.

And I ask you: who moves more volume than Amazon?

The second, and perhaps more damning problem actually comes courtesy of Khan herself, who points out that in the ‘90s the ABA successfully filed suit against big publishers for offering the big chain stores secret discounts, and Barnes & Noble and Borders for pressuring the publishers into providing those discounts. The ABA didn’t wait around for the government to get involved—it went out there and smacked those price discriminators upside the head with a lawyer-powered cosh. It won victories in court, including a $25 million judgment from Penguin and various consent decree settlements from other publishers.

Where’s the private lawsuit now? Did Ms. Khan ask the ABA why it hasn’t gone after Amazon yet, like it went after the publishers, Barnes & Noble, and Borders, rather than standing around wishing the government would? (Could it be they recognize Amazon is actually helping independent bookstores by weakening Barnes & Noble?)

[Update: While I was researching another story, I ran across something I’d forgotten about on The Digital Reader. It turns out that, last year, three booksellers did file an anti-trust lawsuit against Amazon. In December, it was thrown out for a lack of any proof behind their “threadbare allegations.” So, all right, there was one anti-trust lawsuit, and it fizzled. Anyone think they can do better?]

For that matter, if they really thought Amazon was doing something illegal, why haven’t the publishers themselves done anything in a lawyerly manner? As Michael W. Perry has pointed out here several times, when Amazon illegally tried to force small publishers to use its CreateSpace (nee BookSurge) print on demand service, BookLocker sued and Amazon backed down and settled. You can’t tell me that the multi-billion-dollar publishing conglomerates can’t afford lawyers at least as good as a small press’s!

(But no, no legal action for the Big Six publishers, even when they were just positive Amazon was practicing predatory pricing. They took some of the good old-fashioned illegal kind, instead. Why do you suppose they’d rather break the law than use it if it was so readily in their favor? Sort of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?)

You can’t point out that a private group sued successfully in the ‘90s and then use that as your basis to complain the government isn’t suing now. It’s a non sequitur. It doesn’t follow. If these private groups were so rah-rah over Robinson-Patman in the ‘90s, well, let’s see them prove they’re not all talk. Let them put their money where their mouth is and do it again. I’ll be waiting.

]]>http://teleread.com/robinsono-patman-amazon-the-publishers-and-the-aba-wheres-the-lawsuit/feed/1114026Aretha Franklin sues satire site over viral fake news storyhttp://teleread.com/aretha-franklin-sues-satire-site-over-viral-fake-news-story/
http://teleread.com/aretha-franklin-sues-satire-site-over-viral-fake-news-story/#commentsThu, 17 Apr 2014 08:09:17 +0000http://www.teleread.com/?p=112012If you spend much time on social media, you’ve seen those stories show up in your friend feed—a satirical piece that someone assumed was true. Sometimes it’s easy to catch, if it comes from a known satire site like The Onion or Duffelblog (though Duffelblog may not be as familiar to people who don’t have a lot of ex-military social media friends). But if it’s an unfamiliar site, the stories can sometimes seem believable enough that you believe them yourself for a bit. (It’s especially common around April Fools Day, but thanks to sites like this, it’s now April Fools every day of the year.) Some of these sites aren’t

]]>If you spend much time on social media, you’ve seen those stories show up in your friend feed—a satirical piece that someone assumed was true.

Sometimes it’s easy to catch, if it comes from a known satire site like The Onion or Duffelblog (though Duffelblog may not be as familiar to people who don’t have a lot of ex-military social media friends). But if it’s an unfamiliar site, the stories can sometimes seem believable enough that you believe them yourself for a bit. (It’s especially common around April Fools Day, but thanks to sites like this, it’s now April Fools every day of the year.)

Some of these sites aren’t exactly careful to be obvious about it, either. Sometimes the only way you can tell is a cutesy little motto at the top of the page. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if many such sites intentionally went out of their way to make it hard to tell out of a misplaced sense of amusement at seeing people take their stories seriously and share them to social media.

The article about the suit notes that the only sign the site presents that its news is satire is a disclaimer at the bottom of the page. Checking the site now, the disclaimer seems to have migrated up to right above the lede. It’s still in a light grey font and easy to miss if you skim past it. And it seems like so much of an afterthought, I have to wonder if it was really originally there at all. (The News Nerd isn’t archived on archive.org, so I don’t have any way of checking whether that disclaimer was even there at all when the story was originally posted.)

As with many of these sites, if you look at the front page of The News Nerd you’ll see that the stories in aggregate are all so ridiculous that there’s no way you’d believe the site was serious. But if you ran across just one of them in isolation, especially if it was one of those that you really could believe happened, how would you tell? As for the Aretha story, celebrity catfights are common enough that it’s certainly plausible, and the satirical disclaimer was apparently easy to miss—if indeed it was even there at all when the story was originally posted.

Poe’s Law posits that “Without a blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of extremism or fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.” But perhaps the law is a bit too narrow in focus. It’s depressingly easy to create a satirical news story about any topic that lots of people will mistake for the real thing. And that seems to be the core of Franklin’s case: the site is just too deadpan.

“The stories were not presented as satire or humor,” Franklin said through her publicist, Gwendolyn Quinn. “It was presented as a serious news story intended to depict me in a slanderous and derogatory way — defamation of character.”

It should be interesting to see how this case shakes out. I can’t say I’d be sorry to see a chilling effect on satire sites that pretend to be real news sites. One April Fools Day a year is annoying enough without every day having that same potential for self-embarrassment.

]]>http://teleread.com/aretha-franklin-sues-satire-site-over-viral-fake-news-story/feed/2112012Tarantino suit of Gawker over link to leaked script may be capitalizing on Streisand Effecthttp://teleread.com/tarantino-suit-of-gawker-over-link-to-leaked-script-may-be-capitalizing-on-streisand-effect/
http://teleread.com/tarantino-suit-of-gawker-over-link-to-leaked-script-may-be-capitalizing-on-streisand-effect/#respondMon, 03 Feb 2014 17:40:33 +0000http://www.teleread.com/?p=107033Quentin Tarantino got so upset that someone leaked a copy of the script for his next movie, The Hateful Eight, online that he announced he would not be making that movie after all. He got further upset when he found out that celebrity/tech news site Gawker’s “Defamer” blog actually linked to file locker sites where the script could be downloaded. So, he is now suing Gawker. Tarantino’s suit claims that Gawker itself posted the leaked script to those sites, which Gawker editor John Cook insists is false. In the end, the suit comes down to “contributory copyright infringement”—the same thing that sank peer-to-peer service Grokster eight years ago. As with

]]>Quentin Tarantino got so upset that someone leaked a copy of the script for his next movie, The Hateful Eight, online that he announced he would not be making that movie after all. He got further upset when he found out that celebrity/tech news site Gawker’s “Defamer” blog actually linked to file locker sites where the script could be downloaded. So, he is now suing Gawker.

Tarantino’s suit claims that Gawker itself posted the leaked script to those sites, which Gawker editor John Cook insists is false. In the end, the suit comes down to “contributory copyright infringement”—the same thing that sank peer-to-peer service Grokster eight years ago. As with Grokster’s case, Tarantino’s lawsuit holds that, by making the script available, Gawker “induced” its readers to violate Tarantino’s copyright.

Of course, the big difference here is that Gawker is not a peer-to-peer pirate site, but a professional (in one sense, at least) journalistic institution. And it’s arguable that, as newsworthy as it was, once Gawker knew where to find the script it was pretty much journalistically obligated to link it. But then, the First Amendment tends to hit its limits when it runs up against powerful institutions that aren’t happy about what you’re saying. The kid running Think Secret found this out when he reported a few leaks that were just a bit too on-point for Apple and ended up having to close down his site in the settlement.

It may not have too much bearing on the matter at hand, but Google apparently isn’t terribly impressed with the DMCA takedown notices Tarantino filed. Ars Technica notes that, out of 29 URLs his legal team highlighted, Google only removed two.

Legal scholars and journalists have been quoted as concerned about what kind of precedent the case might set for what links news sites might safely post. But I suspect they’re needlessly worried. In all the ways that count, I think this is pretty much a non-story.

Tarantino’s far too savvy a showman not to know about the Streisand Effect. By calling attention to the script being available on pirated sites, he’s pretty much guaranteeing anyone with even a mild interest will go and find it. Neither of the links from the original Gawker article work anymore, but as with any pirated file, it’s available at the usual suspects, including that one infamous site whose logo depicts a sailing ship. (Yeah, good luck getting it taken down from there, QT.) I was able to find it myself in under five minutes of searching, and most of that was tuning my Google requests so they didn’t pull up more variations on the Tarantino-sues-Gawker news story. (I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t link to it, though.)

I do like the fact that everyone eventually posts it, gets it and reviews it on the net. Frankly, I wouldn’t want it any other way. I like the fact that people like my shit, and that they go out of their way to find it and read it.

And in the course of rummaging for the actual script, I came across this rumor that Tarantino has decided to make the movie after all, has already started rewriting the script, and has reached out to Samuel L. Jackson to play one of the main roles. Of course, it’s just a rumor, but seems like a plausible one to me. If that’s true, the whole brouhaha is basically meant to draw more publicity to the movie for when Tarantino actually does make it. And if that’s the case, I don’t expect this case will ever see an actual ruling; it will be quietly settled or possibly even dropped altogether once it’s passed out of the public eye.

It does remind me of something else, though—something that’s a more e-book-related matter. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “anti-circumvention” provision says that “No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof” that is primarily designed to crack DRM. That’s a pretty open-ended prohibition, which—as Chilling Effects points out—can be interpreted pretty broadly:

Question:What does it mean to distribute circumvention tools?

Answer: Section 1201(a)(2) defines distribution as the "manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic" of circumvention tools. This definition can be interpreted extremely broadly as evident in the court’s analysis in the DVD encryption Universal v. Corley case. In its decision, the court considered not only making the source code of a program for free a type of distribution, but also found that merely linking to a web site containing illegal tools can constitute "trafficking."

Some people even claim that you can’t even talk about how to remove DRM, because that could be considered “providing” or “trafficking in” such tools. Which is kind of a ridiculous chilling effect on free speech if you think about it. In this day and age, a hypertext link is basically the same thing as speech. If I say that the name of the main e-book DRM removal plugin for Calibre is made by a fellow named “Apprentice Alf,” how hard is it for you to plug that into Google and find it whether I link directly to it or not?

In any event, the Internet being what it is, there’s no way to scrub either a leaked script or a DRM-cracking tool from the Internet once it’s out there, no matter how many people you sue. Tarantino’s just going to have to live with that—though I suspect living with it might not be as hard as he would want people to believe.